Photography and the Transformation of a Gentleman's Art, 1839-1900

FAIN: FT-59758-12

Laurie Dahlberg
Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-9800)

This book project examines the 19th-century amateur in photography in France, Great Britain, and the United States, from the introduction of photography in 1839 through the watershed moment of the introduction of the Kodak #1 (1888) and its aftermath. I argue that the amateur functions as a barometer of the vicissitudes of class and culture as the compounding changes of industrial modernity brought the century to a close. More than any other visual medium, amateur photography allows us to witness the self-conscious exteriorization of the middle class, as photography grew from the rarefied pursuit of a handful of families on their estates to the constant companion of office workers and shop girls in their off-hours. The topic allows us a singular view to international debates of technological and social progress, inflected by the dynamics of class and gender. I seek support to finish the research and writing of Chapter Three, which deals with the arrival of Kodak and its repercussions.

Associated Products

Dr Diamond's Day Off (Article)
Title: Dr Diamond's Day Off
Author: Laurie Dahlberg
Abstract: Having pioneered the use of photography as a diagnostic and therapeutic tool in portraits of his female patients at the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum in the 1850s, Hugh Welch Diamond is typically remembered as the ‘father of psy- chiatric photography’. This parochial label and the pathos of these well-known images have occluded our contemporary view of Diamond, who was regarded by his peers as one of the leaders of British photography. A recently identified album in the George Eastman House collection raises questions about our assumptions that Diamond approached photography purely in an instrumental or utilitarian way. In fact, the album suggests that at the same time as Diamond was immersed in the documentation of his patients, he was experi- menting with dramatically expressive portraits in ways that forecast the work of pictorialists such as Henry Peach Robinson and Julia Margaret Cameron. The album’s superabundance of portraits of women makes a compelling case for Diamond’s preoccupation with the woman as muse, whether for the purposes of art or science.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03087298.2014.1000095
Primary URL Description: article pdf from History of Photography v. 39 no. 1.
Secondary URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/thph20
Secondary URL Description: homepage for the History of Photography journal
Access Model: subscription for access upon publication; open access after 6 months
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: History of Photography
Publisher: Routledge (Taylor and Francis Group)

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